Boy

Through the streets of Jerusalem, two teenagers' stories will unite to tell the summer adventure of their lives.

Tamar is an amazingly talented but very quiet and insecure girl, who leaves behind her home and all she knows, changing herself unrecognizably--from her looks to her attitude--to brace herself for a dangerous mission to help a loved one.

Asaf, a clumsy, naive, and very shy boy working a boring summer job at City Hall, is given quite a mission himself: to take an uncontrollable stray dog from the pound, put it on a leash, and let it lead him back to its owners to be fined. The dog, Dinkah, leads Asaf through the city to the people and places that will tell him about Dinka's owner--Tamar--and her sudden disappearance. The more stories Asaf hears about this extraordinary girl, the more he falls for her, and as he and Dinkah continue their journey Asaf becomes aware that Tamar is in grave danger. Feeling as if he knows her, and knowing he loves her, Asaf is determined to find Tamar and rescue her from her own rescue mission.

By age 14, he had written five novels and penned a diary about the Nazi occupation of Prague. By 16, he had produced 170 drawings and paintings, edited an underground magazine in the Jewish ghetto, and written numerous short stories. But by then, he had also walked to the gas chamber at Auschwitz.

Slight and stoop-shouldered, filled with intellectual curiosity but prone to mischief, Petr Ginz read voraciously, wrote constantly, developed cryptographs to record BBC broadcasts, built exploding toy cannons to frighten his classmates, and drew and painted a world full of adventure and exotic locations. In his novel, an allegory about Hitler, Petr wrote and illustrated the story of a giant robotic creature that is used by the government to terrorize the people. He ends the book with the warning: "Is it not possible that a new monster may appear on the surface of this earth, worse than this one--a monster that...will torture mankind in a terrible manner."

Through Petr's artwork, novels, short stories and magazine articles, interwoven with fantastical animation, this unconventional documentary portrait reveals his journey from precocious child to young adult, from innocence to the painful awareness of inhumanity, from gifted artist and writer to prodigy. Although Petr's life ended at Auschwitz, it is not a story of tragedy but a celebration--a testament to how a boy’s wonder and creative expression represent the best of what makes us human.